Sony FIU-710

Sleek and slim, the Sony FIU-710 (affectionately known as the "Puppy") is 1.4 ounces and about the size of a few business cards. The right mix of features and power sets it apart from the others we tested and makes it our Editors' Choice.

The Puppy connects via a short USB cable and uses a semiconductive capacitor with an electrical field to sense live fingerprints. The package we tested includes SecureSuite, the same software included in the Ethentica and Kingston products. Installation, setup, enrollment, and verification were trouble free. The Puppy was the only model we evaluated that performed flawlessly on all of our tests, enrolling and verifying 100 percent of our test subjectsthough we could enroll only 10 people on the Puppy, as opposed to 100 on the other devices. Plus we were able to shuttle it easily among different PCs.

The Puppy is an intelligent device, with a 16-bit CPU and 512K of memory. This makes it more expensive than others but lets the unit process, encrypt, and store fingerprint templates internally rather than in a server or desktop database. This both limits and extends the Puppy: You can enroll only 10 to 20 people on a single unit (Sony recommends one per unit). The device is easy to carry, however, so you can log on to any computer in the network as long as you're already enrolled. And its memory allows for easy upgrading as the network security system grows.

What's more, the Puppy functions as a smart card and complies with the Public Key Cryptography Standard (PKCS). That means it can generate and store encryption keys (such as those from PKCS) and digital certificates and signatures. The Sony FIU-710 is a next-generation fingerprint scanner, combining biometrics with smart-card encryption and certification. It's one smart Puppy that has sprinted ahead of the others.

Sally Wiener Grotta is a contributing editor of PC Magazine, a professional photographer, a digital artist, and an early pioneer in computer graphics. She has coauthored several books with Daniel Grotta, including The Illustrated Digital...

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